00:00:00Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30 are experiencing more depression and anxiety than we've ever seen.
00:00:06This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness and a lot of other problems including self-harm, addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
00:00:15So the question is why?
00:00:17And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious,
00:00:20the word that comes up again and again and again and again is I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life.
00:00:25My life feels empty.
00:00:26My life feels meaningless.
00:00:28I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything.
00:00:31There's this existential desertedness, hollowness that they're actually talking about in their life.
00:00:38We have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains.
00:00:44That's what it comes down to.
00:00:45And furthermore, there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work
00:00:52and when you do this you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way that's going to feel like magic.
00:00:58[Music]
00:01:04Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours.
00:01:07I'm Arthur Brooks.
00:01:08This is a show if you've been watching, you already know that this is a podcast dedicated to lifting people up
00:01:14and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
00:01:18I'm a behavioral scientist and that's my personal mission as well.
00:01:21The reason I do this show is because I need you in the movement.
00:01:25I would like you to live a happier, better life and I would like you to share these ideas to lift other people up as well.
00:01:30And I want to equip you with the knowledge and the ideas and the habits and the technique
00:01:36to actually make that possible in your life and the lives of other people.
00:01:39Thank you for watching the show and for sharing the ideas in the show, continuing to watch the show if it's not your first time.
00:01:44Please do recommend this to other people so that we can grow a bigger audience dedicated to these ideas of love and happiness.
00:01:53As always, I would love to hear what you're thinking.
00:01:55Please feedback if you have any questions about what we're talking about here, any criticisms, any pushback, any clarifications.
00:02:02Please write to us here at officehours@arthurbrooks.com or put it in the comments.
00:02:06We read all the comments on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, any place where you're actually getting this.
00:02:11Also, please do leave a review and don't forget to subscribe.
00:02:15This is the second episode today of a three-part series on the meaning of your life.
00:02:21The meaning of your life is not just a concept, the meaning of your life.
00:02:23It's actually my new book, The Meaning of Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
00:02:27You can see the handsome cover right behind me here.
00:02:30That book is being released March 31st, 2026.
00:02:33If you're watching this beforehand, it's coming out really, really quickly.
00:02:37And there's a special event I'd like you to be a part of for the launch of this book.
00:02:41It's an interactive event with people from all over the world.
00:02:44Thousands of people will be tuning in on March 27th to find out about how you can be part of it on YouTube or on Zoom.
00:02:52There are a lot of different ways to be involved.
00:02:54Please go to themeaningofyourlife.com.
00:02:57The website is actually listed here on the screen as I'm talking.
00:03:01themeaningofyourlife, all one word, .com to learn more.
00:03:05This is going to be your go-to spot, I hope, for this particular topic.
00:03:09I'll be joined by a lot of great friends.
00:03:12I'll be in person with Rainn Wilson, the comedic actor, a great friend of mine, comedic actor from The Office.
00:03:17We'll be with Chip Conley, who founded the Modern Elder Academy.
00:03:21Hoda Kotb from The Today Show.
00:03:22Chris Williamson.
00:03:24Dan Buettner.
00:03:25All kinds of guest appearances from people who are friends who are really interested in this topic
00:03:29and very enthusiastic about the release of this book.
00:03:32We're going to be exploring life's biggest questions, and we would like you to be there.
00:03:37It's completely free.
00:03:38So go to themeaningofyourlife.com.
00:03:41Get a copy of the book in advance.
00:03:43If you want, get copies of the book for all the people that you love,
00:03:46especially if you like the book that might make a nice holiday present this coming year.
00:03:51In any case, head on over to the website and learn more about what we're actually doing.
00:03:55Today, in the second of three episodes on The Meaning of Life,
00:04:00I want to talk about The Meaning Crisis and what's actually going wrong in our lives,
00:04:03such that in the data it's very clear that young people, particularly people under 30 years old,
00:04:08are having a harder and harder time.
00:04:10I'll give you the evidence for this in a second.
00:04:12Finding what they think the meaning of their life is.
00:04:15What's that all about? Why is that happening?
00:04:17What's different about life today, and how can you actually start to turn the tables on that?
00:04:24How can you flip the switch and start not just answering what is the meaning of my life,
00:04:28but experiencing the meaning of your life more richly in the way that you live from day to day?
00:04:33That's what we were talking about today.
00:04:35I want you to understand the meaning of your life,
00:04:37and today is going to actually give you an idea how to do it.
00:04:40Now, in the last episode I talked about you need to set the stage,
00:04:44which specifically meant you need to actually have more blank space in your life.
00:04:48You need to be bored more. But now I'm going to tell you how to use the time a little bit better.
00:04:53How can you use the blank space in a different way?
00:04:57So that's what we're talking about. Now, once again,
00:04:59let me talk about the problem that we're experiencing.
00:05:02Nobody who's watching this is not aware of the fact that adults under 30
00:05:06are experiencing more depression and anxiety than we've ever seen.
00:05:09You've seen the data yourself and you've experienced it around the people that you know for sure.
00:05:13If you're my age, it's your adult kids and their friends.
00:05:16If you're that age, it's your friends and maybe you too. Depression since 2008 has increased by about a factor of three,
00:05:23especially for young adults and generalized anxiety has doubled.
00:05:27We've never seen anything like this. This is also accompanied by higher levels of loneliness
00:05:32and a lot of other problems, including self-harm, addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:38So the question is why? And there's lots of explanations for this.
00:05:41There's pop explanations. I've talked about this in the past on the show.
00:05:45You know, different generations always blame each other.
00:05:47You know, young adults will say it's all you. Hey, thanks boomers,
00:05:50you know, for, you know, driving up the price of houses and destroying the,
00:05:53you know, the environment or something and boomers are like,
00:05:55yeah, you're just a bunch of snowflakes. None of that holds water.
00:05:59There's got to be a better scientific explanation for it. And there is.
00:06:02Turns out when you look at the data on the meaning of life that that explains this trend, statistically explains this trend.
00:06:11There's a group, I've talked about it before,
00:06:14called Monitoring the Future that asks people, do you feel like your life is meaningless?
00:06:19And the increases and people saying yes, follow the increases in depression and anxiety.
00:06:25It's inescapable. These things actually go together.
00:06:28When I started seeing that, I started to do interviews with people.
00:06:31One of the things that I like to do as a behavioral scientist is to look at the data
00:06:34and then go behind the data by talking to actual human beings.
00:06:36And when you talk to young adults today who say that they're depressed and anxious,
00:06:40the word that comes up again and again and again and again is I don't know what I'm meant to do with my life.
00:06:44My life feels empty. My life feels meaningless.
00:06:48I don't have a sense of the meaning of anything.
00:06:51There's this existential desertedness, hollowness that they're actually talking about in their life.
00:06:59I want to talk right now about how different traditions have dealt with this in the past.
00:07:06And then I want to relate it to what we can do today.
00:07:09Okay, now this is going to be a pretty scientific episode,
00:07:12but I'm going to talk about the neuroscience that I really like,
00:07:14I really love to share with you in this show in as clear a way as I possibly can.
00:07:19And when I can, I'm going to, or when I remember to, I'm going to repeat some of the hardest concepts here.
00:07:24But I think that this is going to be pretty clear.
00:07:26Here's the point. We have a big philosophical problem that has roots in the way that we're misusing our brains.
00:07:33That's what it comes down to. And furthermore,
00:07:36there's a pretty simple way that you can reignite the way that your brain is supposed to work.
00:07:42And when you do this, you're going to start to understand the meaning of your life in a way
00:07:46that's going to feel like magic. That's what I promise you in this episode today.
00:07:51Okay. Now, when I was a 20 year old,
00:07:57I remember reading a book that had been recommended to me by a lot of musicians.
00:08:02Now, I was a musician in those days. Those of you who followed my work for a while,
00:08:05you know that it was a classical musician, professional, full-time, from when I was 19 until I was 31 years old.
00:08:12I didn't go to college until my late 20s. My whole first career was as a classical French horn player.
00:08:16That's what I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life.
00:08:17And I was really interested in all the different ways that I could train,
00:08:21not just my chops, but also my mind to be a better musician.
00:08:25A great musician that I knew recommended that I read this one book called Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugene Harrigal.
00:08:32Now, he was a German philosophy professor from the mid-century who had done a really weird thing.
00:08:37Instead of just studying all those depressing German philosophers, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Hegel and you know.
00:08:46Fine. Those guys are fine. But he said, you know, I think there's a lot going on in the east that we're not aware of.
00:08:51Now, that might seem pretty obvious to you today,
00:08:53but in 1930 in Germany, that wasn't well known because the stuff just wasn't in circulation.
00:08:59There was no access to it. So instead of just going to the internet, which didn't exist,
00:09:03or even looking at books which you couldn't find, Eugene Harrigal went to Japan and he decided he was going to study Zen Buddhism.
00:09:11He had heard about this exotic philosophy or religion.
00:09:15He wasn't quite sure what, called Zen Buddhism. So he went to Japan.
00:09:18Now, he went to a Zen Buddhist master and said, teach me.
00:09:22And the Zen Buddhist master said, I can't teach you Zen. He said, what do you mean?
00:09:27You're a Zen master. He says, no, you don't learn Zen that way.
00:09:30The way that you learn Zen is by doing something that requires Zen.
00:09:36And then when you master that skill, you will know Zen. Like, huh, okay.
00:09:41I mean, I realize this is kind of abstract and that's what Harrigal was thinking.
00:09:44It was recommended to him that he study archery. Archery is an ancient art that is practiced by a lot of Zen masters.
00:09:51He studied archery in Japan for five years to learn Zen.
00:09:55That's what he did. That's a really interesting book and I recommend that you read it.
00:09:59I'll put it in the show notes, Zen and the Art of Archery.
00:10:02One of the things that he found while he was learning archery is it's full of these kind of mysterious questions that don't have answers.
00:10:10And in point of fact, Zen is taught this way typically.
00:10:13It's taught on the basis of unanswerable questions that explore dark parts of the mind.
00:10:19For example, you probably heard the Zen Buddhist riddle.
00:10:23This is called a Kohen in Japanese.
00:10:26The most famous Zen Buddhist Kohen, and this actually comes from a 18th century Zen Buddhist master named Hakuinakaku.
00:10:34Here it is. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
00:10:39Like, here they can go. Right? Like, that doesn't seem like that's what they're talking about.
00:10:44And, you know, the truth is there is no sound.
00:10:47So what's the sound of no sound? Right?
00:10:50Now, when you read Zen and the Art of Archery, you'll understand how that unanswerable question explored in the mind
00:10:57actually led to him understanding how to be an archer and thus understand Zen itself.
00:11:02Okay, I'm not trying to be too, you know, esoteric here.
00:11:05Here's really the point that I'm trying to make.
00:11:08I've contemplated that a lot in many other Zen Buddhist Kohen's.
00:11:11Here's another, for example. A junior monk, a Zen Buddhist monk, is walking on a country road by himself.
00:11:17And he sees a senior Zen Buddhist monk walking toward him in the other direction.
00:11:22He greets the senior monk and said, where are you going?
00:11:26And he said, I don't know. I said, how do you not know where you're going?
00:11:31Why don't you know where you're going? And he said, because not knowing is the most intimate knowledge.
00:11:37Contemplate. What that kind of question has in common, like what is the sound of one hand clapping,
00:11:44is to make you think without being able to come up with a coherent answer.
00:11:51And that's actually the point. There's something that that ancient tradition
00:11:55and every other religious tradition has figured out.
00:11:59Then when we have deep philosophical questions that can lead to understanding beyond articulation,
00:12:04it does something to exercise the brain and mind.
00:12:08That's a tradition, by the way, in among the ancient Greeks called aporia,
00:12:13or depending on how you pronounce it, aporia. I'm going to call it aporia.
00:12:16OK, I'm an American. Aporia is to sit in a place of puzzlement with unanswerable questions on purpose.
00:12:25Now, this is wacky by today's standards.
00:12:29Why? Because we have a culture, and you see where I'm going with this in a second.
00:12:33We have a culture that if you can't type a question into a Google search bar
00:12:37and get back an answer that makes sense to you, it's not a real question.
00:12:41I mean, it's weird because there's a whole generation of people who think that if it's not on the Internet,
00:12:45it doesn't exist. And so therefore a question that can't be answered by Google search or or even by AI,
00:12:53therefore is a senseless question. And what these ancient traditions have asserted,
00:12:58the ancient Greeks, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition,
00:13:02all of the karmic religions, all are based fundamentally on unanswerable questions that would say,
00:13:08no, no, no, no, if you want to understand the deep mysteries of life, you can't feed it into a Google search bar.
00:13:16You can't ask chat GPT because of chat GPT can answer it.
00:13:20It's the wrong kind of question to give you the mystical knowledge right now.
00:13:26We got to figure out if that's true. And what I'm going to do today is to try to convince you that it is absolutely true
00:13:33and that you can understand the point that I'm making and you can use the point that I'm making.
00:13:37Very practically in your life. That's what I'm going to show you in the next half hour.
00:13:42Okay, now I have my own kind of Collins that I assigned to my students.
00:13:48I asked my students to just contemplate the following two questions.
00:13:51Why am I alive? Why am I alive? You can answer that.
00:13:56I guess with respect to, you know, a sperm and an egg or the role of God in creating you or for what purpose or all of that.
00:14:04But fundamentally, that's a mystical question that requires understanding often beyond words.
00:14:10Here's a second question for what would I give my life really now?
00:14:13Okay, if you're a parent and grandparent with me, that's super easy.
00:14:17What else for what else would you give your life?
00:14:20Why do you know that that what that does is that that exercises the brain in a very weird way.
00:14:29These are hard or impossible to answer questions.
00:14:32And here's what the ancient traditions claim when you contemplate those unanswerable questions.
00:14:39Something happens to your understanding of the meaning of your life.
00:14:44It doesn't mean that you suddenly say, oh, the meaning of my life is 1 2 3 XYZ.
00:14:48You suddenly gain an understanding of the meaning of your life subsequent to the consideration of mystical questions.
00:14:55And that's what my students find when I pose these questions to them and my adult children as well.
00:15:01Hmm.
00:15:02Now this is basically and this is not just, you know, the mystical traditions or the philosophers either.
00:15:08Many more modern behavioral scientists and even medical professionals have asserted this exact same thing.
00:15:15Perhaps the greatest psychiatrist of the early 20th century Carl Jung and psychoanalyst said more or less the same thing.
00:15:23He said the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble.
00:15:29In other words, a problem is important, which means that it gives you knowledge of meaning if you can't solve it.
00:15:36Right now, that might sound like I'm, you know, proposing the myth of Sisyphus.
00:15:42You know, push the boulder up the hill and trying to figure out the answer to a question.
00:15:45Let it roll back down again is like his exercise and futility.
00:15:47So just forget it. Go ask Chad GBT and and try to distract yourself.
00:15:52No, no, no. He's saying that there is understanding beyond articulation.
00:15:58That's what I want to get at today. And it turns out, my friends,
00:16:02that we can sort out the mystery of what they're saying in much more much clearer,
00:16:07more distinct neuroscientific terms based on very recent advances in neuroscience and behavioral science.
00:16:16They're exactly right. And I'm going to tell you why and how you can use that knowledge.
00:16:20The explanation for why unanswerable questions give you special knowledge about the meaning of your life.
00:16:28Starts with a theory of what neuroscientists call hemispheric lateralization.
00:16:32Now it's a fancy way of saying a simple thing that the two sides of the brain do different things.
00:16:37The right side of the brain does one thing. The left side of the brain does something else.
00:16:40We have to call it something fancy
00:16:41because that's how college professors get tenure is put on fancy words hemispheric lateralization.
00:16:47This is based a lot on a number of important neuroscientists working.
00:16:52Now you might think, oh, yeah, I remember that from the if you're my age.
00:16:54You'll say I remember that for the 70s when people were either artsy or analytical right brain artsy types or left brain analytical types.
00:17:01I thought this by the way, I was raised by a painter and a mathematician.
00:17:04My father was a mathematician. My mother was an artist.
00:17:07We all said all mom super right brain and dad's he's really left brain
00:17:10because he's a mathematician and I always thought I took after my mom
00:17:13because you know, all I wanted to do was play the French horn write music.
00:17:18I painted a lot. I like to write poetry.
00:17:21I mean, I was like the arts guy and I had no interest in math and science,
00:17:25which might be surprising to you right now because of what I do for a living.
00:17:28Well, it turns out that when I finally went to college in my late 20s,
00:17:31I took a bunch of classes in economics and calculus and linear algebra and basic statistics.
00:17:38And I already said that anyway,
00:17:40the whole point is that I started studying math and quantitative methods for the first time
00:17:44and it lit me up like a Christmas tree man.
00:17:47I'm like, oh, it turns out that I'm left brain like that.
00:17:49No, wrong. The way of thinking about hemispheric lateralization in those days was stupid and wrong.
00:17:54Because we don't have one side that does the arts and the other side that does the math.
00:17:58But we do have different ways of answering questions
00:18:02and solving problems in the two sides of our brain.
00:18:05And that takes me to the work of the famous and great neuroscientist in the Gilchrist.
00:18:11He teaches at Oxford University. He's a medical doctor and neuroscientist.
00:18:14This is one of these guys who spent a lot of time in school.
00:18:16He's an MD PhD who is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist.
00:18:20And he looks at the most cutting-edge research
00:18:23and conducts the most cutting-edge research on how the different sides of the brain do different things.
00:18:27Back to the old theory of hemispheric lateralization.
00:18:29He wrote a very important book, I'll put it in the show notes, called The Master and His Emissary.
00:18:33And what he says is your brain works like the master and the emissary,
00:18:37where the right side of the brain is the master that asks the big questions.
00:18:42The left side of the brain is the emissary that goes out and actually tries to find the answers analytically.
00:18:48Big philosophical questions, basic analytical and day-to-day tasks.
00:18:54You have two sides of the brain because you got to do stuff.
00:18:56So he'll give an example like this.
00:18:58On the right side of the brain, I'm like, what's the why of my life?
00:19:01Because I'm made to worship and love.
00:19:04Love who? Love my family.
00:19:06What does it mean to love my family?
00:19:08Love to adore them and to take care of them.
00:19:11What does that mean? Well, taking care of them means I got to support them.
00:19:14How do I do that? Then the left brain kicks in by going to work and going and buying groceries
00:19:20and being a responsible individual and following certain moral laws.
00:19:24See what I mean? You have the big why questions of life
00:19:28and you have the more quotidian and prosaic how to and what questions.
00:19:33Right side, left side.
00:19:36There's another way of thinking about this that I actually learned when I was studying applied mathematics.
00:19:40I was working for the RAND Corporation,
00:19:42which is a very famous think tank in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, California.
00:19:46And that's where I was actually working on my PhD and to make a living.
00:19:50I was doing military operations research, which is to say applied mathematics to do modeling for the US Air Force.
00:19:56Now, one of the things that I found was that mathematical models of war situations are notoriously inaccurate.
00:20:06And one time I asked a really great mathematician.
00:20:09I mean, this guy was a master of these methods.
00:20:13Why is it that we can ever model these really highly,
00:20:17highly complex war fighting situations with any sort of accuracy?
00:20:21And he said, oh, because it's the wrong kind of problem.
00:20:23He said that the models that we put together are complicated methods
00:20:27and the problems that we're trying to solve are complex problems, complicated and complex.
00:20:32Now, I'm not splitting hairs. Here's the difference.
00:20:35Complicated problems are, well, they're really complicated.
00:20:39They're hard to solve. You need computing horsepower and lots of genius.
00:20:43But once you solve them, they're solved.
00:20:46You know, building a jet aircraft is a very complicated problem.
00:20:49There were no jet aircraft a hundred years ago. And now there are.
00:20:52And we stamp them out and the planes almost never crash.
00:20:55It's amazing. As a matter of fact, we solved the complicated problem with sufficient genius.
00:21:00Lots of things in life are like that.
00:21:02You know, building an app to figure out where you can find a pizza at 10 p.m.
00:21:05That's a complicated problem. A toaster is a complicated problem.
00:21:09It might seem kind of simple, but I defy you to build one in your in your garage.
00:21:13You'll probably burn your house down. And yet it's been solved.
00:21:16You can go to the Walmart and get one for 15 bucks and it'll be,
00:21:19you know, sitting on your kitchen counter for the next 10 years.
00:21:22Amazing. Other complicated problems. Life is full of complicated problems.
00:21:26As a matter of fact, the whole engineering culture of Silicon Valley is based on the idea
00:21:31that all of life is complicated problems.
00:21:34We've got to solve these complicated problems. But here's the difficulty with that.
00:21:38Anytime somebody reduces the richness of human life to complicated problems,
00:21:43bad things happen. That's what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called scientific socialism.
00:21:48That we could come up with the equations of human behavior
00:21:51and then with mathematical exactitude work them out.
00:21:54Fyodor Dostoevsky said that's wrong because that's what he called the Palace of Crystal.
00:22:01You can't work out the things in life with mathematical exactitude.
00:22:04It's a different kind of problem. Woodrow Wilson,
00:22:08the former president, he talked about scientific public administration
00:22:11where you could actually figure out government
00:22:13so that people would be like cogs in a machine. And that didn't turn out so great,
00:22:17I dare say. No matter what your politics are,
00:22:19we don't want to be treated like cogs in a machine.
00:22:22The problem with all of that is that the things we care about the most
00:22:25are not the complicated problems of the dating app
00:22:28and the widget and the entertainment and the tech and all of that.
00:22:35What we care about is not the complicated problems.
00:22:38We care about the complex problems. Complex problems are problems that are super easy to understand,
00:22:46but they're impossible to solve. You can only live with them and understand them.
00:22:50Case in point, the reason I love NFL football is because it's a complex problem that can't be solved.
00:22:55You can only watch it. You can only watch it and let it unfold.
00:22:59It's unsolvable. I don't care how big a computer that you have,
00:23:02how good the algorithm is, how powerful your AI is,
00:23:05you're not going to be able to predict if in the Super Bowl the Seahawks are going to beat the Patriots.
00:23:11Now, they did. I kind of predicted that. I'm from Seattle.
00:23:14So, you know, all is right in the universe right now.
00:23:18But the whole point is I watched the whole game and I was like nervous.
00:23:22Why? Because I love it because I care about it.
00:23:25And the reason is because it couldn't be simulated because it's not a complicated problem.
00:23:29It's not a tech problem. It's a sports thing.
00:23:32Sports is something that we love because it represents the passion
00:23:36and spontaneity of the things we most care about in life.
00:23:40Why is it that we want a cat but not a mechanical cat?
00:23:45A mechanical cat is a complicated thing.
00:23:47A cat is a complex thing, meaning I understand it.
00:23:51It needs to be scratched, and it needs kibble, and it needs a litter box, and it needs warmth.
00:23:56But I never know what it's going to do because it's alive.
00:24:00That's complexity. That's just to live with it.
00:24:04All of love, all of meaning, all of mystery is complex, not complicated.
00:24:11All the things that you care about the most are complex, not complicated.
00:24:14My marriage is unbelievably complex.
00:24:17Which means that, you know, I've been married 34 years.
00:24:20In 2026, we'll have our 35th wedding anniversary.
00:24:24And I haven't solved my marriage yet because I can't solve it like a complicated problem.
00:24:27I just, I live with my marriage. I don't know what's going to happen.
00:24:31Maybe we're going to have an argument tonight.
00:24:33I mean, yeah, that's why I love my marriage because it's alive.
00:24:38The fact that it's alive is because it's complex.
00:24:41You can't simulate my marriage, man. You can't do it.
00:24:44This is, by the way, the reason that you'll never have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend that's going to satisfy you.
00:24:49You'll never have an AI therapist that will give you what you need
00:24:53because you need another complex being that interacts with your complexity
00:24:58to actually give you the love that you seek and help you with the problems that you truly want to solve.
00:25:03See my point, right? And what I'm driving at is that we're in a world of complicated solutions,
00:25:11and we're not solving any of our complex problems
00:25:14because our complex problems are love, happiness, and mystery, and the meaning of life.
00:25:20And there's one thing that you can't solve with your most powerful machine
00:25:25and your best possible internet simulation of life, and that's the meaning of life.
00:25:31Now, back to what I was talking about with hemispheric lateralization.
00:25:34Complicated problems are on the left side of the brain.
00:25:38You're working through all the complicated problems, like how do I get to work?
00:25:41Do I got a better way to commute? You know, what's the best GPS device to actually get that done?
00:25:46How am I going to solve this particular problem?
00:25:49I'm going to use the left brain, right? That's what I'm doing all day.
00:25:52And I'm using these complicated problems, I'm solving them with the left hemisphere.
00:25:55How to and what? Great.
00:25:58However, the Y side, the right hemisphere, is where I deal with the complex problems.
00:26:04Now imagine that everything that I'm doing in life, in contemporary life, is pushing me to the left side
00:26:10because life is technologizing.
00:26:12Life is getting more and more complicated.
00:26:14Life is promising me, and it's an illusion and a lie.
00:26:19Life is, and the culture, and the economy, and the leaders,
00:26:25they're promising me a perfect, complicated solution to my complex problems in life.
00:26:31My problems of life and love and mystery and meaning.
00:26:33What's going to happen? I'm going to get more and more lonely.
00:26:35I'm going to get more and more depressed.
00:26:37I'm going to get more and more anxious, and what am I going to do?
00:26:40I'm going to binge the complicated stuff until the cows come home, and it's not going to help.
00:26:45Does that sound familiar?
00:26:47It should, because that's exactly what's going on.
00:26:51Okay.
00:26:52What are we going to do about that? When all our whiz-bang, complicated technology,
00:26:58all it's doing is giving us a more and more developed left hemisphere of our brains.
00:27:03Meanwhile, we're atrophying on the right. We're starving to death in the right.
00:27:08It's like, as Tolstoy put it, when you're trying to use science to actually solve the problem of love,
00:27:15he called it starving to death in a toy store.
00:27:19You're in the wrong kind of store. That's his point.
00:27:23You need to get over to the right side of your brain.
00:27:25And you're not going to do it with gaming and swiping right and surfing and scrolling and YouTube shorts.
00:27:35You're not going to do it. You need to do it in a different way.
00:27:39So here's a way. Zen Buddhist koans, the mysteries of the Bible, the unanswered riddles of life.
00:27:48Maybe that's it. I use the Zen Buddhist koan example,
00:27:52but let me give you an example that's a little bit closer to my own faith tradition.
00:27:57I'm a Christian, and in the Christian Bible, and also in the Jewish Bible,
00:28:01there's the ultimate book of right hemispheric complex meaning.
00:28:08Which is the book of Job. What that's really all about is Job, who's a character who is everything stripped away,
00:28:15and spends the whole book actually questioning why this happened.
00:28:21And by the end of the book of Job, after all his suffering,
00:28:23he understands without being able to articulate why suffering happened in his life.
00:28:29By doing the questioning of the unanswerable questions.
00:28:33It's in every tradition. So how are you going to do that?
00:28:37How can any of us do that when we know everything except the why of anything?
00:28:45That's the state that we're in. Where there's no mystery and no meaning,
00:28:50but a lot of stuff and a lot of tech and a lot of knowledge.
00:28:55How do we break out of that? What do we do?
00:28:59Well, let me propose some solutions on how you can actually use the wisdom of the ages to open up the right hand side of your brain.
00:29:06Because here's the point, my friends. Here's what the Zen Buddhists were suggesting,
00:29:09and the ancient Christian monks and the ancient Greeks with their aporia.
00:29:14What were they suggesting? If you simply query these unanswerable things,
00:29:20and you do it with patience, and you do it with sincerity,
00:29:25you will open up the part of the brain that you need to actually start to understand and experience the meaning of your life.
00:29:31And it'll happen to you like magic. Now,
00:29:33this is one of the reasons that that most religious traditions send people away on contemplative retreats,
00:29:39and you're not supposed to bring your phone.
00:29:41Sometimes you're not even supposed to bring books because all you're supposed to do is think,
00:29:46and they'll give you these ancient questions to actually think about.
00:29:50So, for example, this is how the Dalai Lama starts his day every day.
00:29:56You think, wow, I mean, I've heard, I read someplace that the Dalai Lama, he meditates eight hours a day, man.
00:30:02He's like sitting in the Lotus position going, no, that's not how the Dalai Lama meditates every day.
00:30:08As you know, if you watch the show, I've worked a lot with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
00:30:12We're going to have content coming out on the podcast in the coming months of actual events
00:30:17that I've done with him that I want to share with you.
00:30:19It'll be an exclusive look behind the scenes on that.
00:30:22And I've asked him, what does this meditation actually mean?
00:30:25He gets up at about three o'clock in the morning.
00:30:27And the first thing he does is he meditates for two hours,
00:30:29but he does something that's actually called analytical meditation.
00:30:33And what he does is he'll read a couple of Tibetan scriptures that are especially esoteric,
00:30:42that are really hard to understand, that don't have a clear meaning.
00:30:46And he will ponder those things for two hours.
00:30:49You see what he's doing, right?
00:30:51This is aporia, sitting in the state of puzzlement on the basis of questions that don't have clear answers,
00:30:56but rather only have understanding. That's exactly what he's doing.
00:30:59That's what Aristotle, if he saw the Dalai Lama doing, oh, that's aporia.
00:31:04That's what you have to do if you want to understand the deep mystery and meaning behind all things.
00:31:10He's doing that not to come up with the answers to those questions,
00:31:13but rather to raise his consciousness to the greater meaning of all things.
00:31:19That's what's actually happening because of the way that he's using his brain.
00:31:22Catholics do this, too. This is called mental prayer.
00:31:25And another way that we think about this is when when Christians call it Lectio Divina,
00:31:29which is the divine reading, where you'll read something as the most mysterious,
00:31:34hard to understand thing that you actually can in the Bible.
00:31:37That seems like just it doesn't have an obvious understanding.
00:31:40It doesn't have an obvious application. As a matter of fact,
00:31:43you read it and you contemplate it to seek a divine understanding.
00:31:47That's mental prayer. And that's what monks have been doing for thousands of years.
00:31:54And you can do that, too. But should to do that,
00:31:57you actually have to transgress the norms and rules of the modern world.
00:32:04Because we don't do that anymore. We don't. Remember,
00:32:07we've technologized ourselves three quarters of the way to death.
00:32:11Oh, yeah. No, I understand this. I don't understand this scripture.
00:32:14I don't understand this passage in Holy Scripture. I don't know.
00:32:17Let me ask Chad GBT. And then Chad GBT will come back with, that's a very good question.
00:32:23And many of the greatest philosophers throughout all time have asked that question.
00:32:26They're going to butter you up in this way.
00:32:28And then they're going to start giving you, you know,
00:32:29what certain what a certain person has said
00:32:31and another person has said and another person has said
00:32:34and nothing about the understanding that you actually might gain.
00:32:37You can't outsource the work to a digital left hemisphere.
00:32:43By the way, that's what AI is. It's an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain.
00:32:48And it's great at that. When you try to use it to help your right brain,
00:32:52when you're using it as a therapist or a girlfriend or a buddy,
00:32:55that's when it leaves you profoundly existentially depressed and empty.
00:33:00Every single time because it can pass the Turing test of the left side of your brain,
00:33:05but it can't pass the Turing test on the right side of your brain.
00:33:08You know that that's not giving you what you need that you know,
00:33:11that's what's actually leaving you empty.
00:33:13So to do a Poria today is hard countercultural,
00:33:18which means you got to schedule it. It's your mental workout.
00:33:21Now for some people it's really really hard to do a real workout.
00:33:24You know, I go to the gym every day for an hour because I've been doing it for decades.
00:33:28It's become a total habit. That's what you have to do with a Poria as well.
00:33:32You need to schedule it. Now, I recommend scheduling five minutes a day
00:33:34or ten minutes a day to contemplate a mysterious question, a question of great mystery.
00:33:41Maybe it's a Zen Buddhist colon. Maybe it's a passage from the Bible.
00:33:44Maybe it's something that doesn't have a clear answer for you
00:33:47and simply read it slowly and then repeat it to yourself
00:33:52and sit in a state of puzzlement about that.
00:33:56That's going to light up the right hemisphere of your brain
00:34:00and that's going to start to exercise what you need to start finding the meaning of your life,
00:34:07meaning it all sorts of different things.
00:34:09The space that I actually do that is usually two times a day after I work out.
00:34:13I go to Catholic mass with my wife and there's tons of quiet time in there
00:34:18and there's time for contemplation in there.
00:34:20And then before we go to bed, we like to pray the rosary,
00:34:22which is a thousand year old ancient Catholic meditation, which is repetitive prayer,
00:34:28where you're contemplating mysteries from scripture.
00:34:32That's my way. What's your way?
00:34:35How are you going to practice a Poria and practice it regularly?
00:34:39That's step one. Step two, here's a way to actually do this to make this a little bit easier.
00:34:44You don't just have to sit there because maybe that's hard for you.
00:34:46The ancients have almost always practiced a Poria while walking
00:34:52and there's the idea that ambulation, walking, walking, walking, is physical contemplative activity.
00:35:00Walking meditations exist in almost every tradition, as a matter of fact.
00:35:02There's a reason the second colon that I talked about with the monk walking around along the road
00:35:07who meets the senior monk walking in the other direction.
00:35:09The ambulation was critical to the second Buddhist monk's understanding that he was actually getting.
00:35:15So if sitting in a Poria is really hard for you, walk in a Poria.
00:35:19That's a good alternative. And this is one of the reasons also that pilgrimages exist in almost every tradition as well.
00:35:25I got super special knowledge beyond my ability to articulate it.
00:35:30Ineffable knowledge when I walked the Camino de Santiago, which is this ancient 1,100 year old walk.
00:35:35It was, for those of you who saw the movie with Martin Sheen, The Way, that's what he was walking.
00:35:42And why was he doing that, by the way? Because he was trying to understand the meaning of his life.
00:35:46And that's what people have been doing for more than a thousand years.
00:35:48I guess I'm going to walk 800 kilometers or whatever you do.
00:35:52I think I did the last 160 kilometers because I'm a slacker.
00:35:55Actually, the reason is because Mrs. B said, "I'm not doing the whole thing."
00:35:58And I wanted to do it with my soulmate. But yeah, man, you'll find what you're looking for.
00:36:02You will find what you're looking for. You'll walk your way into a Poria.
00:36:09And as such, you'll walk your way into knowledge.
00:36:11I promise you. Now, I'm going to continue with this if you keep listening to this series.
00:36:18But if you really want more now, get the meaning of your life.
00:36:21This is what this book is all about.
00:36:23This is a very practical guide to doing things that never seemed practical.
00:36:29See, practical life today is a big mess. Practical life today is about this gadget and that app
00:36:35and this amazing feat of engineering. Practical life today is all left hemispheric and it's all complicated.
00:36:42And the truth of the matter is that you need a right hemispheric complex orientation toward your life
00:36:49if you want any prayer of finding the meaning of your life.
00:36:52What I've tried to do today is to give you the beginning of the technique that has worked in every tradition.
00:36:58But this is only one way to do it.
00:37:00There are many other ways that you're going to get in this book, the meaning of your life.
00:37:04As a matter of fact, there are literally five other ways that you're going to get it.
00:37:07Another one you'll get in next week's episode and going forward, I'll talk a lot more about them.
00:37:12But trust me, if you do these things, your life is really going to change.
00:37:15This is backed by science and experience and my own life.
00:37:20Before we finish, let's take a couple of questions. I love the questions.
00:37:23Please keep writing in the questions and thank you so much for doing that.
00:37:26Austin, he says he read my book, Love Your Enemies, and liked it. Thank you for that, Austin.
00:37:31It really helped him calm down. That was a book, Love Your Enemies. I didn't make that up.
00:37:35Obviously, that's Matthew 544. That's from the Sermon on the Mount.
00:37:38Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Those are words of Jesus. Those aren't my words.
00:37:42I didn't make that up. Clever, right?
00:37:44But it's a book about actually how that's the most transgressive teaching in all of humanity,
00:37:50that that's what actually can change anybody's life by not just coexisting with your enemies
00:37:57and not just tolerating your enemies and not having a basic non-violent attitude triggered enemies,
00:38:04but actually learning how to love your enemies. And that requires that you understand love in a different way.
00:38:08To love is not a feeling at all. You don't have to feel weren't third your enemy. You need to love your enemy,
00:38:13which is to will his or her good. That's the ancient definition of love, by the way, which transcends feelings.
00:38:19Okay. Anyway. I read your book, Love Your Enemies. It's helped me calm down.
00:38:25However, I still struggle with getting mad when I see social media posts or even just a bumper sticker on a car on the drive to work.
00:38:32I got it, brother. I live in the world, too. On a practical level,
00:38:35how might I combat this contempt I feel for others and act with love?
00:38:40Here's how you do it. Here's how you do it. You stand up your own limbic system.
00:38:43Your limbic system is reacting to what you see,
00:38:47which is which is actually being processed in the occipital lobe of your brain, the visual cortex of your brain.
00:38:53Your limbic system is being excited by that because you're perceiving a threat,
00:38:58a threat to your way of thinking or your threat to your way of life. That contempt is happening to you.
00:39:04But that doesn't mean that you have to act on it. On the contrary, you can take an opposite signal strategy.
00:39:09You see somebody who's got an obnoxious bumper sticker and I don't care if it's right or left.
00:39:13It depends on how it affects you. Start by praying for that person and not that that person will take a bumper sticker off their car.
00:39:21Pray for that person and say, I hope that person has love in their life.
00:39:27I hope that person has a beautiful life.
00:39:30That's a loving kindness meditation in the Buddhist tradition as well.
00:39:35We start with loving kindness toward yourself and then toward your loved ones.
00:39:37And then you extend it actually out toward the people you don't even know.
00:39:40And finally, to the people that you don't even like. That's a really, really hard thing to do.
00:39:44But you can will that. And when you do that, your orientation changes completely.
00:39:49Austin is magic. Jesse Stokes, last but not least, once again, coming into the email address.
00:39:55I was wondering if you have any travel protocols that you follow when you're traveling
00:39:59so that you're still your best highest functioning cell phone traveling.
00:40:02I absolutely do that. Those of you who saw my morning protocols will put that in the show notes.
00:40:06The evening protocols, the phone protocols. I've got an episode we're going to do in the coming months called relationship protocols.
00:40:13I'm I'm protocols, baby, because I'm all about science and the public interest and applying it to my own life through better habits and better behaviors.
00:40:20I don't have to think about everything constantly. And I absolutely do have travel protocols because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year.
00:40:27So what am I going to do? I'll put together an episode on it.
00:40:29Thank you. I'm not going to go through it now because that would be 45 minutes.
00:40:32Jesse, you don't want that, but you will want to watch that when I actually put that together in a very organized way.
00:40:37So I'll be kind of like George Clooney and up and up in the air, except like George Clooney, Ph.D. nerd scientist.
00:40:44I'll do an episode like that. Thanks for the thanks for the idea.
00:40:47Well, that's it, my friends. Let me know your thoughts at office hours at Arthur Brooks dot com.
00:40:52Like the episode if you liked it. Subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, all of the above.
00:40:59Leave a comment and make sure that you tell your friends that this is the show you like to watch.
00:41:03Also, follow me on all the social media platforms, IG, LinkedIn, yada yada.
00:41:09I love it all. And I put the content on Instagram, especially that's that's actually people don't see any place else.
00:41:15Order The Meaning of Your Life, the book behind me. It comes out this week to learn more.
00:41:21I hope that you find the meaning of your life. I hope you found that this is a useful episode for you.
00:41:26And maybe after you stop watching this, you'll turn off all your devices and sit in the poria,
00:41:32answering the questions, the beautiful questions, the divine questions that don't have immediate answers.
00:41:37But the understanding of which contains information about the meaning of your life.
00:41:43See you next week.